A child left behind: SF student failed every class in...

1of 4A student uses a laptop at the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center in San Francisco, which helps children transitioning out of foster care in the Western Addition neighborhood.Photo: Brian Feulner / Special to The Chronicle

2of 4Amia Ignacio-Barnes, 9, works on homework after school at the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center. A student at Washington High School in San Francisco received straight F’s for all four years. He got assistance and enrolled in a continuation school after he received mentoring at the center.Photo: Brian Feulner / Special to The Chronicle

3of 4Patricia Scott, executive director of the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center in San Francisco, walks passed a mural at the center.Photo: Brian Feulner / Special to The Chronicle

4of 4Phllip Stone, a member of the board of directors at Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, speaks with staff about after-school programs.Photo: Brian Feulner / Special to The Chronicle

For more than a quarter-century, San Francisco’s public schools have failed to close the achievement gap for black, Latino and Pacific Islander students. At a meeting where community activists urged the school board to make changes, Pat Scott told a shocking story.

“Last week, we got a boy who’s a senior,” said Scott, executive director of the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center in the Western Addition.“I asked to see his transcript. He has straight F’s.”

Scott repeated herself.

“Straight F’s,” she said. “Freshman, sophomore, junior and senior year. And no one has intervened. He got a notice he wasn’t going to graduate last week — and nothing happened.”

The Chronicle obtained the boy’s transcript after the Nov. 14 meeting. It showed that the student attended Washington High School in the Outer Richmond District for nearly four years and failed every one of his classes.

An F in biology.

An F in world history.

An F in Spanish.

An F in P.E.

All F’s from grade nine to the first semester of grade 12. A social worker who looked into the boy’s case found that he also failed every class in the eighth grade, his last year of middle school.

Did the student, a Latino boy whose name The Chronicle is withholding, attend classes? How could he fail and still be advanced to the next grade? And most pressing of all, what allowed him to fall through the cracks for so long?

Washington High School students leave the school Thursday afternoon March 22, 2018 at the end of the day in San Francisco, Calif. After a student at Washington High School received straight Fs for all four years, there are questions about why he was permitted to fail for so long.

Photo: Brian Feulner / Brian Feulner, Special to The Chronicle

School officials, citing confidentiality laws, have refused to answer some of these questions. Without open access to records, it’s difficult to tell how responsive the school was to the student’s situation. But these are questions staffers are asking at Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, which helps students and young people transitioning out of foster care in the Western Addition.

Jerry Trotter, program director for college and career readiness at the center, said he hadn’t seen anything like the boy’s transcript in his 15 years of working with students.

“We were dumbfounded,” he said. “In my work with high school students — and students, period — I’ve never seen anything as blatantly disengaged, not concerned. Even the audacity to print the report. As an institution, I would feel challenged or embarrassed to produce something like that without some kind of extensive explanation.”

Susan Saunders, Washington High’s principal, declined to say how the student had been advanced from one grade to the next having failed every class, and what action, if any, the school took to intervene. She also declined to speak generally about how school officials would handle a student who consistently failed classes.

More by Jenna Lyons

“It could be bringing up specific family situations that I don’t feel comfortable sharing with a reporter,” Saunders said.

Gentle Blythe, a school district spokeswoman, also declined to talk about the student’s specific situation. She did say that “the school administration doesn’t see how (it) would be possible” for a student to receive all F’s, because “there are several checks along the way.”

There are ways a student who did not get course credits can advance to the next grade, Blythe said, such as a parent denying a staff recommendation to hold back a student.

The student, who could not be reached for comment, arrived at the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center in October and enrolled in a career readiness program, staffers said. As a part of enrollment, the center asks for a student’s transcript and the most recent report card, which is how they learned of this boy’s situation.

Staffers contacted the Success Center, a local nonprofit that assists with educational programs. From there, the student was placed in a continuation school, where he is now working toward a GED, said Kiyana Merritt, the boy’s case manager at Booker T. Washington.

“It’s never too late to make a change,” Merritt said. “He definitely found confidence and faith coming to Booker T.”

Merritt said Washington High officials had told her they tried on several occasions to contact the student’s parents, but it’s not clear why, or if, they gave up.

“That kind of shows the relationships schools have with families of color,” she said. “They definitely need to repair the relationships.”

Kevin Truitt, chief of student family and community support for the school district, said there are “lots of things the school could do” to help a student who is failing every class. He declined to provide specifics.

“There’s probably a root cause,” Truitt said. “When you’re talking about a student that’s failing every class, every semester for years, that’s an extremely rare and severe case.”

Mary Rivers, a grant writer for Booker T. Washington, outlined the boy’s situation in a report on African Americans in the Western Addition for the city Department of Public Health. Although the student is Latino, his case was included because educational struggles tend to be similar among both groups, Rivers said.

Rivers interviewed the student and school staff members to compile the report, she said. The student, referred to as “client 1,” first met with counselors in middle school to try to improve his grades. He flunked all his classes in eighth grade but was still advanced to high school, Rivers wrote.

As he entered Washington High, the student felt nervous going into classrooms where he didn’t know anyone and “had no knowledge of what to do and where to go,” Rivers wrote. “This caused him to get in with the wrong crowd, which started distracting him from his studies.”

As a freshman, the boy told his high school counselor that he couldn’t focus in class and felt lost, but Rivers said the adviser was indifferent.

“The counselor (Asian) was aggressive in how she spoke with client 1 (Latino), making him uncomfortable,” Rivers wrote. “Leaving with the feeling of not being understood, respected, and discriminated against, client 1 did not seek her assistance again, nor did she seek him out.”

Rivers added, “Client 1’s parents reached out to the school and was (sic) not given resources, assistance as to how to work with her son, or resolve to the issue.”

Booker T. Washington staffers said the boy held a job at the time, and had to look after several younger siblings. The student said he was “in and out” of classes, but the school did not report him as a chronic truant, the staffers said.

Under district rules, school officials must call a student’s parents after the first and second unexcused absences, and then send a “declaration of legal truant” letter if the situation continues. If the absences persist, the district can refer the case to the district attorney’s office for violating state laws that require regular school attendance.

But before that happens, students are supposed to be offered counseling, mentoring, tutoring or a referral to an after-school program. Washington High School offers Beacon, a program funded by the city Department of Children, Youth and Their Families.

According to Rivers’ report, the student “was never offered a tutor, nor given the option to go to this program.”

Staffers at Booker T. Washington say the situation is indicative of schools’ broader problem in dealing with underachieving minority students. Scott, the executive director, recalled the case of a 12th-grader who came to the center barely able to read a basic children’s book.

Now Playing:

A group of students from Homestead and Cupertino high schools show off their DIY Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset made of cardboard and other household parts. They showed their creation a week before Google have out #cardboard VR viewers at Google I/O.

Video: San Francisco Chronicle

Trotter, the program director for college and career readiness, said some students who get A’s and B’s in math can’t do basic multiplication and division during mentoring sessions.

“The consistency, for us, was these are all of our children of color,” Trotter said.

Seventy-four percent of black students across the district did not meet 2016-17 state assessment standards in at least one subject area, district data show. The same was true for 61 percent of Latino students and 65 percent of Pacific Islander students. Only 14 percent of whites and 16 percent of Asian Americans failed to meet standards in one subject area.

“Nothing has changed in years and years,” Scott said. “There’s no help. There’s no intervention.”

After the student came to Booker T., staff reached out to Washington High administrators about the student’s transcript, leading to an agreement to refer “at-risk students” to the community center, according to Rivers’ report.

“If any student was considered at-risk, it was this one,” Rivers wrote. “How could the school district allow this to continue past the eighth grade, and even in the first year of high school? Where are the balances and checks for students, specifically the African Americans and Latinos? Why did the school not make a plan of action in the beginning?”

Jenna Lyons is a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle who focuses on crime and breaking news. Previously, she covered higher education as a correspondent for USA Today College, and she also worked as a copy editor and page designer at The Gainesville Sun. She hails from Florida, and joined The Chronicle after graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in Journalism and a degree in French and Francophone studies.